Hybrid Power

By Margot Roosevelt/Los Angeles

Warning to all who drive gas guzzlers while fretting about the melting ice cap and the diminished rain forest: Your bluff is called. Finally. Just as the U.S. is grappling with the problem of how to meet its international promise to reduce global warming, the first hybrid gasoline-electric cars are hitting the U.S. market. Though these green machines, a major advance in automobile engineering, are getting off to a slow start, down the road they may yet compete bumper to bumper with gas-only cars.

Honda's peppy two-seat Insight travels 600 miles on a tiny tank, a boon to the greenhouse-gassed planet. Toyota's Prius, a sleek five-seater, gets 52 m.p.g. in city driving and is up to 90% cleaner than the average car. U.S. carmakers, reluctant latecomers, have been shamed into promising hybrid models. But will these fuel sippers sell to a pollutants-be-damned nation enraptured by showy sport utes?

If the new technology catches on, it could go a long way toward compensating for last week's stalled progress on the 1997 international treaty, originally negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, to cut carbon dioxide emissions. So far, Toyota has a five-month waiting list for its Prius (Latin for "to go before"), and it has logged 7,300 orders since the car's July launch. It will easily sell out this year's small production run of 12,000 cars. Sales of the Insight, introduced last December, are slower--about 3,500--partly because many dealerships can't get the cars, and partly because the two-seater isn't as practical as the Prius. Measured against the 17 million cars and trucks sold yearly in the U.S., it is a modest beginning. A major obstacle: the price trade-off for being green. Savings at the pump--magnified by this year's gasoline-price jumps--are offset by the $20,000 cost of either car. That's several thousand dollars more than similar-size conventional models. If proposed federal tax incentives--pushed by an unusual alliance of automakers and environmentalists--ultimately pass, "there could be a hybrid in every garage," says Roland Hwang, a transportation expert with the Natural Resources Defense Council. That is surely a green dream, but rigorous new laws in several states, including California and New York, are forcing manufacturers to sell cleaner cars, setting what is expected to be a national trend.

The promise of the hybrids is that consumers won't have to make sacrifices in style, performance or comfort to drive them. Unlike battery-electric vehicles, which are plugged into the power grid, hybrids combine a small gasoline engine with an electric motor and travel under their own power. When the Prius advances slowly or idles in traffic, the electric motor takes over, thus minimizing the pollution caused by stop-and-go driving. The gasoline engine powers the battery and kicks in for acceleration. When the car coasts or brakes, the motor becomes a generator, capturing the energy that would normally be lost and transforming it into electricity. In the Insight, a lightweight but superefficient three-cylinder, 63-h.p. gas engine supplies most of the oomph, and the electric motor offers a 10-h.p. boost when needed.

Techno-savvy fans have embraced the hybrids, flooding Internet chat rooms with talk of torque and throttle response, boasting about mileage. "Kick Some Gas!" urges one site, Priusenvy.com Senator Robert Bennet of Utah, chairman of the Republican High-Tech Task Force, fills his Insight's gas tank once a month. "It's the ideal commuter car," he says. But he has yet to persuade his fellow legislators to make the switch.

The size of the Insight and Prius is a potential turnoff for consumers, who fear collisions with gargantuan SUVs. "I'd like to use less gas," says Laura Blalock, a Memphis, Tenn., chemist. "But I can't enjoy saving Mother Earth if I'm worrying about getting squashed like a bug." Customers like Blalock won't have long to wait for heftier hybrids. In 2003, Ford will produce a hybrid version of its Escape sport utility, expected to get 40 m.p.g. By then, Toyota's hybrid minivan, the Estima, will probably have reached the U.S. market, along with a hybrid Honda Civic. Proving that hybrids are not necessarily environmentally virtuous, DaimlerChrysler has announced a hybrid version of its monster Durango truck that would get only 18 m.p.g.--a hybrid muscle car.

One constituency that isn't revved up about the cars is the car dealers. So far, they have little incentive to push hybrids because profit margins are higher on bigger, gas-only vehicles. Honda and Toyota dealers' splashy newspaper ads rarely if ever mention hybrids. Prospective Prius customers complain that since only trained salesmen are permitted to sell them, the untrained ones steer them away from the cars. Would-be Insight customers say they can't even find one to test-drive. "We don't direct people to the hybrid," allowed Honda salesman Neil Perlmutter at a North Hollywood, Calif., dealership. "It is for people who want high gas mileage, not for the masses." Juan Capdet, a salesman at Sheridan Toyota in Santa Monica, Calif., is an enthusiast, but he acknowledges, "There is a lot of misinformation. You have to explain the new technology."

Whether they like it or not, automakers have no choice but to produce more hybrids. Skyrocketing SUV sales mean the companies' average gas efficiency is declining, so to meet federal rules the manufacturers need ultra-high-mileage vehicles to compensate. Ford's chairman, William Ford, has predicted that hybrids could account for 20% of the U.S. market in a decade. Beyond the need for fuel economy, however, looms the urgency of curbing greenhouse gases--a quarter of which result from car and truck emissions.

"Hybrids allow people to feel they are doing the right thing for the planet," says Michael Feinstein, a Santa Monica councilman who just bought a Prius for his mother. That's nice, but the breakthrough is that Americans finally have green cars that are convenient enough and cool enough to drive.